Justice
Kennedy announced the judgment of the
Court and delivered an opinion, in which The Chief Justice
and Justice Alito
join.

The Court in this case must determine
whether an amendment to the Constitution of the State of
Michigan, approved and enacted by its voters, is invalid
under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the
Constitution of the United States.

In 2003 the Court reviewed the
constitutionality of two admissions systems at the
University of Michigan, one for its undergraduate class
and one for its law school. The undergraduate admissions
plan was addressed in Gratz v. Bollinger,
539 U. S. 244. The law
school admission plan was addressed in Grutter
v. Bollinger, 539 U. S.
306. Each admissions process permitted the
explicit consideration of an applicant’s race. In Gratz,
the Court invalidated the undergraduate plan as a
violation of the Equal Protection Clause. In Grutter,
the Court found no constitutional flaw in the law school
admission plan’s more limited use of race-based
preferences.

In response to the Court’s decision
in Gratz, the university revised its
undergraduate admissions process, but the revision still
allowed limited use of race-based preferences. After a
statewide debate on the question of racial preferences
in the context of governmental decisionmaking, the
voters, in 2006, adopted an amendment to the State
Constitution prohibiting state and other governmental
entities in Michigan from granting certain preferences,
including race-based preferences, in a wide range of
actions and decisions. Under the terms of the amendment,
race-based preferences cannot be part of the admissions
process for state universities. That particular
prohibition is central to the instant case.

The ballot proposal was called
Proposal 2 and, after it passed by a margin of 58
percent to 42 percent, the resulting enactment became
Article I, §26, of the Michigan Constitution. As
noted, the amendment is in broad terms. Section 26
states, in relevant part, as follows:

“(1) The University of Michigan,
Michigan State University, Wayne State University, and
any other public college or university, community
college, or school district shall not discriminate
against, or grant preferential treatment to, any
individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color,
ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public
employment, public education, or public contracting.

“(2) The state shall not discriminate
against, or grant preferential treatment to, any
individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color,
ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public
employment, public education, or public contracting.

“(3) For the purposes of this section
‘state’ includes, but is not necessarily limited to, the
state itself, any city, county, any public college,
university, or community college, school district, or
other political subdivision or governmental
instrumentality of or within the State of Michigan not
included in sub-section 1.”

Section 26 was challenged in two
cases. Among the plaintiffs in the suits were the
Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration and
Immigrant Rights and Fight for Equality By Any Means
Necessary (BAMN); students; faculty; and prospective
applicants to Michigan public universities....

Before the Court addresses the
question presented, it is important to note what this
case is not about. It is not about the
constitutionality, or the merits, of race-conscious
admissions policies in higher education. The
consideration of race in admissions presents complex
questions, in part addressed last Term in Fisher
v. University of Texas at Austin. In Fisher,
the Court did not disturb the principle that the
consideration of race in admissions is permissible,
provided that certain conditions are met. In this case,
as in Fisher, that principle is not
challenged. The question here concerns not the
permissibility of race-conscious admissions policies
under the Constitution but whether, and in what manner,
voters in the States may choose to prohibit the
consideration of racial preferences in governmental
decisions, in particular with respect to school
admissions.

This Court has noted that some States
have decided to prohibit race-conscious admissions
policies. In Grutter, the Court noted:
“Universities in California, Florida, and Washington
State, where racial preferences in admissions are
prohibited by state law, are currently engaged in
experimenting with a wide variety of alternative
approaches. Universities in other States can and should
draw on the most promising aspects of these race-neutral
alternatives as they develop.” In this way, Grutter
acknowledged the significance of a dialogue regarding
this contested and complex policy question among and
within States. There was recognition that our federal
structure “permits ‘ innovation and
experimentation’ ” and “enables greater citizen
‘ involvement in democratic processes.’ ”
While this case arises in Michigan, the decision by the
State’s voters reflects in part the national dialogue
regarding the wisdom and practicality of race-conscious
admissions policies in higher education....

In holding §26 invalid in the
context of student admissions at state universities, the
Court of Appeals relied in primary part on Seattle,
supra,which it deemed to control the
case. But that determination extends Seattle’s
holding in a case presenting quite different issues to
reach a conclusion that is mistaken here. Before
explaining this further, it is necessary to consider the
relevant cases that preceded Seattle and the
background against which Seattle itself arose.

Though it has not been prominent in
the arguments of the parties, this Court’s decision in Reitman
v. Mulkey, 387 U. S. 369
(1967), is a proper beginning point for discussing the
controlling decisions. In Mulkey, voters
amended the California Constitution to prohibit any
state legislative interference with an owner’s
prerogative to decline to sell or rent residential
property on any basis. Two different cases gave rise to
Mulkey. In one a couple could not rent an
apartment, and in the other a couple were evicted from
their apartment. Those adverse actions were on account
of race. In both cases the complaining parties were
barred, on account of race, from invoking the protection
of California’s statutes; and, as a result, they were
unable to lease residential property. This Court
concluded that the state constitutional provision was a
denial of equal protection. The Court agreed with the
California Supreme Court that the amendment operated to
insinuate the State into the decision to discriminate by
encouraging that practice. The Court noted the
“immediate design and intent” of the amendment was to
“establish a purported constitutional right to privately
discriminate.” The Court agreed that the amendment
“expressly authorized and constitutionalized the private
right to discriminate.” The effect of the state
constitutional amendment was to “significantly encourage
and involve the State in private racial
discriminations.” In a dissent joined by three other
Justices, Justice Harlan disagreed with the majority’s
holding. The dissent reasoned that California, by the
action of its voters, simply wanted the State to remain
neutral in this area, so that the State was not a party
to discrimination. That dissenting voice did not prevail
against the majority’s conclusion that the state action
in question encouraged discrimination, causing real and
specific injury.

The next precedent of relevance, Hunter
v. Erickson, 393 U. S.
385 (1969) , is central to the arguments the
respondents make in the instant case. In Hunter,
the Court for the first time elaborated what the Court
of Appeals here styled the “political process” doctrine.
There, the Akron City Council found that the citizens of
Akron consisted of “ ‘people of different race[s],
. . . many of whom live in circumscribed and segregated
areas, under sub-standard unhealthful, unsafe,
unsanitary and overcrowded conditions, because of
discrimination in the sale, lease, rental and financing
of housing.’ ” Id., at 391. To address
the problem, Akron enacted a fair housing ordinance to
prohibit that sort of discrimination. In response,
voters amended the city charter to overturn the
ordinance and to require that any additional
antidiscrimination housing ordinance be approved by
referendum. But most other ordinances “regulating the
real property market” were not subject to those
threshold requirements. Id., at 390. The
plaintiff, a black woman in Akron, Ohio, alleged that
her real estate agent could not show her certain
residences because the owners had specified they would
not sell to black persons.

Central to the Court’s reasoning in Hunter
was that the charter amendment was enacted in
circumstances where widespread racial discrimination in
the sale and rental of housing led to segregated
housing, forcing many to live in “ ‘unhealthful,
unsafe, unsanitary and overcrowded conditions.’ ”
The Court stated: “It is against this background that
the referendum required by [the charter amendment] must
be assessed.” Akron attempted to characterize the
charter amendment “simply as a public decision to move
slowly in the delicate area of race relations” and as a
means “to allow the people of Akron to participate” in
the decision. The Court rejected Akron’s flawed
“justifications for its discrimination,”justifications
that by their own terms had the effect of acknowledging
the targeted nature of the charter amendment. The Court
noted, furthermore, that the charter amendment was
unnecessary as a general means of public control over
the city council; for the people of Akron already were
empowered to overturn ordinances by referendum. The
Court found that the city charter amendment, by singling
out antidiscrimination ordinances, “places special
burden on racial minorities within the governmental
process,” thus becoming as impermissible as any other
government action taken with the invidious intent to
injure a racial minority. Justice Harlan filed a
concurrence. He argued the city charter amendment “has
the clear purpose of making it more difficult for
certain racial and religious minorities to achieve
legislation that is in their interest.” But without
regard to the sentence just quoted, Hunter
rests on the unremarkable principle that the State may
not alter the procedures of government to target racial
minorities. The facts in Hunter established
that invidious discrimination would be the necessary
result of the procedural restructuring. Thus, in Mulkey
and Hunter, there was a demonstrated
injury on the basis of race that, by reasons of state
encouragement or participation, became more aggravated.

Seattle is the third case
of principal relevance here. There, the school board
adopted a mandatory busing program to alleviate racial
isolation of minority students in local schools. Voters
who opposed the school board’s busing plan passed a
state initiative that barred busing to desegregate. The
Court first determined that, although “white as well as
Negro children benefit from” diversity, the school
board’s plan “inures primarily to the benefit of the
minority.” 458 U. S., at 472. The Court next found that
“the practical effect” of the state initiative was to
“remov[e] the authority to address a racial problem—and
only a racial problem—from the existing decisionmaking
body, in such a way as to burden minority interests”
because advocates of busing “now must seek relief from
the state legislature, or from the statewide
electorate.” Id., at 474. The Court therefore
found that the initiative had “explicitly us[ed] the
racial nature of a decision to determine the
decisionmaking process.” Id., at 470 (emphasis
deleted).

Seattle is best understood
as a case in which the state action in question (the bar
on busing enacted by the State’s voters) had the serious
risk, if not purpose, of causing specific injuries on
account of race, just as had been the case in Mulkey
and Hunter. Although there had been no
judicial finding of de jure segregation with
respect to Seattle’s school district, it appears as
though school segregation in the district in the 1940’s
and 1950’s may have been the partial result of school
board policies that “permitted white students to
transfer out of black schools while restricting the
transfer of black students into white schools.” Parents
Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle
School Dist. No. 1 (2007). In 1977, the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People
(NAACP) filed a complaint with the Office for Civil
Rights, a federal agency. The NAACP alleged that the
school board had maintained a system of de jure
segregation. Specifically, the complaint alleged “that
the Seattle School Board had created or perpetuated
unlawful racial segregation through, e.g., certain
school-transfer criteria, a construction program that
needlessly built new schools in white areas, district
line-drawing criteria, the maintenance of inferior
facilities at black schools, the use of explicit racial
criteria in the assignment of teachers and other staff,
and a general pattern of delay in respect to the
implementation of promised desegregation efforts.”
As part of a settlement with the Office for Civil
Rights, the school board implemented the “Seattle Plan,”
which used busing and mandatory reassignments between
elementary schools to reduce racial imbalance and which
was the subject of the state initiative at issue in Seattle....

The Seattle Court,
accepting the validity of the school board’s busing
remedy as a predicate to its analysis of the
constitutional question, found that the State’s
disapproval of the school board’s busing remedy was an
aggravation of the very racial injury in which the State
itself was complicit. The broad language used in Seattle,
however, went well beyond the analysis needed to resolve
the case. The Court there seized upon the statement in
Justice Harlan’s concurrence in Hunter that
the procedural change in that case had “the clear
purpose of making it more difficult for certain racial
and religious minorities to achieve legislation that is
in their interest.” That language, taken in the context
of the facts in Hunter, is best read simply to
describe the necessity for finding an equal protection
violation where specific injuries from hostile
discrimination were at issue. The Seattle
Court, however, used the language from the Hunter concurrence
to establish a new and far-reaching rationale. Seattle
stated that where a government policy “inures
primarily to the benefit of the minority” and
“minorities . . . consider” the policy to be “ ‘in
their interest,’ ” then any state action that
“place[s] effective decisionmaking authority over” that
policy “at a different level of government” must be
reviewed under strict scrutiny. In essence, according to
the broad reading of Seattle, any state action
with a “racial focus” that makes it “more difficult for
certain racial minorities than for other groups” to
“achieve legislation that is in their interest” is
subject to strict scrutiny. It is this reading of Seattle
that the Court of Appeals found to be controlling here.
And that reading must be rejected.

The broad rationale that the Court of
Appeals adopted goes beyond the necessary holding and
the meaning of the precedents said to support it; and in
the instant case neither the formulation of the general
rule just set forth nor the precedents cited to
authenticate it suffice to invalidate Proposal 2. The
expansive reading of Seattle has no principled
limitation and raises serious questions of compatibility
with the Court’s settled equal protection jurisprudence.
To the extent Seattle is read to require the
Court to determine and declare which political policies
serve the “interest” of a group defined in racial terms,
that rationale was unnecessary to the decision in Seattle;
it has no support in precedent; and it raises serious
constitutional concerns. That expansive language does
not provide a proper guide for decisions and should not
be deemed authoritative or controlling. The rule that
the Court of Appeals elaborated and respondents seek to
establish here would contradict central equal protection
principles.

In cautioning against “impermissible
racial stereotypes,” this Court has rejected the
assumption that “members of the same racial
group—regardless of their age, education, economic
status, or the community in which they live—think alike,
share the same political interests, and will prefer the
same candidates at the polls.” It cannot be
entertained as a serious proposition that all
individuals of the same race think alike. Yet that
proposition would be a necessary beginning point were
the Seattle formulation to control, as the
Court of Appeals held it did in this case. And if it
were deemed necessary to probe how some races define
their own interest in political matters, still another
beginning point would be to define individuals according
to race. But in a society in which those lines are
becoming more blurred, the attempt to define race-based
categories also raises serious questions of its own.
Government action that classifies individuals on the
basis of race is inherently suspect and carries the
danger of perpetuating the very racial divisions the
polity seeks to transcend. Were courts to embark
upon this venture not only would it be undertaken with
no clear legal standards or accepted sources to guide
judicial decision but also it would result in, or at
least impose a high risk of, inquiries and categories
dependent upon demeaning stereotypes, classifications of
questionable constitutionality on their own terms.

Even assuming these initial steps
could be taken in a manner consistent with a sound
analytic and judicial framework, the court would next be
required to determine the policy realms in which certain
groups—groups defined by race—have a political interest.
That undertaking, again without guidance from any
accepted legal standards, would risk, in turn, the
creation of incentives for those who support or oppose
certain policies to cast the debate in terms of racial
advantage or disadvantage. Thus could racial antagonisms
and conflict tend to arise in the context of judicial
decisions as courts undertook to announce what
particular issues of public policy should be classified
as advantageous to some group defined by race. This risk
is inherent in adopting the Seattle formulation.

There would be no apparent limiting
standards defining what public policies should be
included in what Seattle called policies that
“inure primarily to the benefit of the minority” and
that “minorities . . . consider” to be “ ‘in their
interest.’ ” Those who seek to represent the
interests of particular racial groups could attempt to
advance those aims by demanding an equal protection
ruling that any number of matters be foreclosed from
voter review or participation. In a nation in which
governmental policies are wide ranging, those who seek
to limit voter participation might be tempted, were this
Court to adopt the Seattle formulation, to
urge that a group they choose to define by race or
racial stereotypes are advantaged or disadvantaged by
any number of laws or decisions. Tax policy, housing
subsidies, wage regulations, and even the naming of
public schools, highways, and monuments are just a few
examples of what could become a list of subjects that
some organizations could insist should be beyond the
power of voters to decide, or beyond the power of a
legislature to decide when enacting limits on the power
of local authorities or other governmental entities to
address certain subjects. Racial division would be
validated, not discouraged, were the Seattle formulation,
and the reasoning of the Court of Appeals in this case,
to remain in force.

Perhaps, when enacting policies as an
exercise of democratic self-government, voters will
determine that race-based preferences should be adopted.
The constitutional validity of some of those choices
regarding racial preferences is not at issue here. The
holding in the instant case is simply that the courts
may not disempower the voters from choosing which path
to follow. In the realm of policy discussions the
regular give-and-take of debate ought to be a context in
which rancor or discord based on race are avoided, not
invited. And if these factors are to be interjected,
surely it ought not to be at the invitation or
insistence of the courts.

One response to these concerns may be
that objections to the larger consequences of the Seattle
formulation need not be confronted in this case, for
here race was an undoubted subject of the ballot issue.
But a number of problems raised by Seattle,
such as racial definitions, still apply. And this
principal flaw in the ruling of the Court of Appeals
does remain: Here there was no infliction of a specific
injury of the kind at issue in Mulkey and Hunter
and in the history of the Seattle schools. Here
there is no precedent for extending these cases to
restrict the right of Michigan voters to determine that
race-based preferences granted by Michigan governmental
entities should be ended.

It should also be noted that the
judgment of the Court of Appeals in this case of
necessity calls into question other long-settled rulings
on similar state policies. The California Supreme Court
has held that a California constitutional amendment
prohibiting racial preferences in public contracting
does not violate the rule set down by Seattle.
Coral Constr., Inc. v. City and County of
San Francisco, 50 Cal. 4th 315, 235 P. 3d
947 (2010). The Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
has held that the same amendment, which also barred
racial preferences in public education, does not violate
the Equal Protection Clause. Wilson, 122 F. 3d
692 (1997). If the Court were to affirm the essential
rationale of the Court of Appeals in the instant case,
those holdings would be invalidated, or at least would
be put in serious question. The Court, by affirming the
judgment now before it, in essence would announce a
finding that the past 15 years of state public debate on
this issue have been improper. And were the argument
made that Coral might still stand because it
involved racial preferences in public contracting while
this case concerns racial preferences in university
admissions, the implication would be that the
constitutionality of laws forbidding racial preferences
depends on the policy interest at stake, the concern
that, as already explained, the voters deem it wise to
avoid because of its divisive potential. The instant
case presents the question involved in Coral and
Wilson but not involved in Mulkey, Hunter,
and Seattle. That question is not how to
address or prevent injury caused on account of race but
whether voters may determine whether a policy of
race-based preferences should be continued.

By approving Proposal 2 and thereby
adding §26 to their State Constitution, the
Michigan voters exercised their privilege to enact laws
as a basic exercise of their democratic power. In the
federal system States “respond, through the enactment of
positive law, to the initiative of those who seek a
voice in shaping the destiny of their own times.”
Michigan voters used the initiative system to bypass
public officials who were deemed not responsive to the
concerns of a majority of the voters with respect to a
policy of granting race-based preferences that raises
difficult and delicate issues.

The freedom secured by the
Constitution consists, in one of its essential
dimensions, of the right of the individual not to be
injured by the unlawful exercise of governmental power.
The mandate for segregated schools, Brown v.
Board of Education, 347
U. S. 483 (1954) ; a wrongful invasion of
the home, Silverman v. United States,
365 U. S. 505 (1961) ;
or punishing a protester whose views offend others, Texas
v. Johnson, 491
U. S. 397 (1989) ; and scores of other
examples teach that individual liberty has
constitutional protection, and that liberty’s full
extent and meaning may remain yet to be discovered and
affirmed. Yet freedom does not stop with individual
rights. Our constitutional system embraces, too, the
right of citizens to debate so they can learn and decide
and then, through the political process, act in concert
to try to shape the course of their own times and the
course of a nation that must strive always to make
freedom ever greater and more secure. Here Michigan
voters acted in concert and statewide to seek consensus
and adopt a policy on a difficult subject against a
historical background of race in America that has been a
source of tragedy and persisting injustice. That history
demands that we continue to learn, to listen, and to
remain open to new approaches if we are to aspire always
to a constitutional order in which all persons are
treated with fairness and equal dignity. Were the Court
to rule that the question addressed by Michigan voters
is too sensitive or complex to be within the grasp of
the electorate; or that the policies at issue remain too
delicate to be resolved save by university officials or
faculties, acting at some remove from immediate public
scrutiny and control; or that these matters are so
arcane that the electorate’s power must be limited
because the people cannot prudently exercise that power
even after a full debate, that holding would be an
unprecedented restriction on the exercise of a
fundamental right held not just by one person but by all
in common. It is the right to speak and debate and learn
and then, as a matter of political will, to act through
a lawful electoral process.

The respondents in this case insist
that a difficult question of public policy must be taken
from the reach of the voters, and thus removed from the
realm of public discussion, dialogue, and debate in an
election campaign. Quite in addition to the serious First Amendment implications of
that position with respect to any particular election,
it is inconsistent with the underlying premises of a
responsible, functioning democracy. One of those
premises is that a democracy has the capacity—and the
duty—to learn from its past mistakes; to discover and
confront persisting biases; and by respectful, rationale
deliberation to rise above those flaws and injustices.
That process is impeded, not advanced, by court decrees
based on the proposition that the public cannot have the
requisite repose to discuss certain issues. It is
demeaning to the democratic process to presume that the
voters are not capable of deciding an issue of this
sensitivity on decent and rational grounds. The process
of public discourse and political debate should not be
foreclosed even if there is a risk that during a public
campaign there will be those, on both sides, who seek to
use racial division and discord to their own political
advantage. An informed public can, and must, rise above
this. The idea of democracy is that it can, and must,
mature. Freedom embraces the right, indeed the duty, to
engage in a rational, civic discourse in order to
determine how best to form a consensus to shape the
destiny of the Nation and its people. These First Amendment dynamics would
be disserved if this Court were to say that the question
here at issue is beyond the capacity of the voters to
debate and then to determine.

These precepts are not inconsistent
with the well-established principle that when hurt or
injury is inflicted on racial minorities by the
encouragement or command of laws or other state action,
the Constitution requires redress by the courts.
As already noted, those were the circumstances that the
Court found present in Mulkey, Hunter,
and Seattle. But those circumstances are not
present here.

For reasons already discussed, Mulkey,
Hunter, and Seattle are not
precedents that stand for the conclusion that Michigan’s
voters must be disempowered from acting. Those cases
were ones in which the political restriction in question
was designed to be used, or was likely to be used, to
encourage infliction of injury by reason of race. What
is at stake here is not whether injury will be inflicted
but whether government can be instructed not to follow a
course that entails, first, the definition of racial
categories and, second, the grant of favored status to
persons in some racial categories and not others. The
electorate’s instruction to governmental entities not to
embark upon the course of race-defined and race-based
preferences was adopted, we must assume, because the
voters deemed a preference system to be unwise, on
account of what voters may deem its latent potential to
become itself a source of the very resentments and
hostilities based on race that this Nation seeks to put
behind it. Whether those adverse results would follow
is, and should be, the subject of debate. Voters might
likewise consider, after debate and reflection, that
programs designed to increase diversity—consistent with
the Constitution—are a necessary part of progress to
transcend the stigma of past racism.

This case is not about how the debate
about racial preferences should be resolved. It is about
who may resolve it. There is no authority in the
Constitution of the United States or in this Court’s
precedents for the Judiciary to set aside Michigan laws
that commit this policy determination to the voters. See
Sailors v. Board of Ed. of County of Kent,
387 U. S. 105, 109 (1967)
(“Save and unless the state, county, or municipal
government runs afoul of a federally protected right, it
has vast leeway in the management of its internal
affairs”). Deliberative debate on sensitive issues such
as racial preferences all too often may shade into
rancor. But that does not justify removing certain
court-determined issues from the voters’ reach.
Democracy does not presume that some subjects are either
too divisive or too profound for public debate.

The judgment of the Court of Appeals
for the Sixth Circuit is reversed.

It is so ordered.

Justice
Kagan took no part in the consideration or
decision of this case.

It has come to this. Called upon to
explore the jurisprudential twilight zone between two
errant lines of precedent, we confront a frighteningly
bizarre question: Does the Equal Protection Clause of
the Fourteenth Amendmentforbid
what its text plainly requires? Needless to
say (except that this case obliges us to say it), the
question answers itself. “The Constitution proscribes
government discrimination on the basis of race, and
state-provided education is no exception.” It is
precisely this understanding—the correct
understanding—of the federal Equal Protection Clause
that the people of the State of Michigan have adopted
for their own fundamental law. By adopting it, they did
not simultaneously offend it.

Even taking this Court’s sorry line of
race-based-admissions cases as a given, I find the
question presented only slightly less strange: Does the
Equal Protection Clause forbid a State from banning a
practice that the Clause barely—and only
provisionally—permits?...

Justice
Sotomayor, with whom Justice Ginsburg joins,
dissenting.

We are fortunate to live in a
democratic society. But without checks, democratically
approved legislation can oppress minority groups. For
that reason, our Constitution places limits on what a
majority of the people may do. This case implicates one
such limit: the guarantee of equal protection of the
laws. Although that guarantee is traditionally
understood to prohibit intentional discrimination under
existing laws, equal protection does not end there.
Another fundamental strand of our equal protection
jurisprudence focuses on process, securing to all
citizens the right to participate meaningfully and
equally in self-government. That right is the bedrock of
our democracy, for it preserves all other rights.

Yet to know the history of our Nation
is to understand its long and lamentable record of
stymieing the right of racial minorities to participate
in the political process. At first, the majority acted
with an open, invidious purpose. Notwithstanding the
command of the Fifteenth Amendment,
certain States shut racial minorities out of the
political process altogether by withholding the right to
vote. This Court intervened to preserve that right. The
majority tried again, replacing outright bans on voting
with literacy tests, good character requirements, poll
taxes, and gerrymandering. The Court was not fooled; it
invalidated those measures, too. The majority persisted.
This time, although it allowed the minority access to
the political process, the majority changed the ground
rules of the process so as to make it more difficult for
the minority, and the minority alone, to obtain policies
designed to foster racial integration. Although these
political restructurings may not have been
discriminatory in purpose, the Court reaffirmed the
right of minority members of our society to participate
meaningfully and equally in the political process....

The Constitution does not protect
racial minorities from political defeat. But neither
does it give the majority free rein to erect selective
barriers against racial minorities. The
political-process doctrine polices the channels of
change to ensure that the majority, when it wins, does
so without rigging the rules of the game to ensure its
success. Today, the Court discards that doctrine without
good reason.

In doing so, it permits the decision
of a majority of the voters in Michigan to strip
Michigan’s elected university boards of their authority
to make decisions with respect to constitutionally
permissible race-sensitive admissions policies, while
preserving the boards’ plenary authority to make all
other educational decisions. “In a most direct sense,
this implicates the judiciary’s special role in
safeguarding the interests of those groups that are
relegated to such a position of political powerlessness
as to command extraordinary protection from the
majoritarian political process.” Seattle, 458
U. S., at 486 (internal quotation marks omitted).
The Court abdicates that role, permitting the majority
to use its numerical advantage to change the rules
mid-contest and forever stack the deck against racial
minorities in Michigan. The result is that Michigan’s
public colleges and universities are less equipped to do
their part in ensuring that students of all races are
“better prepare[d] . . . for an increasingly
diverse workforce and society . . .” Grutter,
539 U. S., at 330 (internal quotation marks
omitted).

Today’s decision eviscerates an
important strand of our equal protection jurisprudence.
For members of historically marginalized groups, which
rely on the federal courts to protect their
constitutional rights, the decision can hardly bolster
hope for a vision of democracy that preserves for all
the right to participate meaningfully and equally in
self-government.